Research In Motion is holding its big event right now, BlackBerry World 2011, and some interesting things have already come out. First, RIM is entering into a rather pervasive partnership with Microsoft to make Bing the default through all levels of the BlackBerry operating system (includig the QNX-based one). Second, the first piece of videographic evidence of Android applications running on the PlayBook.

(...) and was considering getting one myself until it was announced that Bing was the only "thing" (because it's not a search engine) on it, a lot like Windows Phone 7 Series (yeah, I know that the name has changed, but it's only slightly less stupid).

For us brazillians, Bing means getting the right search result at least on number 5-6 - that if it's even on the first page.

I'm under the impression that Microsoft has not bothered to update the search crawler behind Bing from its Windows Live Search days for us here. Bing Maps also won't return decent results, with searches for specific mall adresses returning places at least 750 km away from the wanted destination. Google Maps finds those and sugests them to me before I type the 6th letter.

The thing is, we're a country with 74 million internet users, which is kind of something, and I'm not willingly giving a single cent to Microsoft until they decide to step their game up. No Xbox games, no Office for Mac (which has always sucked), no Bing, no Android phones coming from HTC (you get the picture). I'm not citing WP7 phones here because they haven't bothered to launch them on a country with 210 million phone lines - obviously a smart move.
I also encourage others in similar discontent with Microsoft to do so as well.